


Another Spasm of Words Unsaid

by elle_stone



Series: Tumblr Requests [6]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Ficlet, Post-Break Up, Very briefly mentioned character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-21
Updated: 2017-08-21
Packaged: 2018-12-18 02:14:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11864523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elle_stone/pseuds/elle_stone
Summary: Six months after breaking off their engagement, Clarke returns to town, wanting to talk.A modern AU 2x16 aftermath.





	Another Spasm of Words Unsaid

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the prompt "Tell me to go and I will, but if you ask me to stay I’ll never leave you again" requested by anonymous on tumblr.

Bellamy Blake was not left at the altar. That is the salacious-gossip version of the story, the one that’s spread its way around town because the Mayor’s daughter is the closest to celebrity that Arkadia has, and because the accident made front-page news, and because that’s what gossip does: it builds upon itself, it grows beyond itself.

The truth is no less painful, but quieter. It lacks the drama of a groom in his best suit, waiting at the end of the aisle, hopeless and pathetic as the interminable seconds pass him by. The truth was Clarke pacing back and forth on their front porch, refusing to talk to him, while he perched on the railing and made up worst-case scenarios in his head. The truth was her walking halfway down the steps, like she was planning on walking right out of town without turning back. He doesn’t remember anymore what she said. Something about needing space and time. He’d said he could go with her, they could get away together, but even then, hating the way he sounded like he was pleading, hating the words as they were formed by traitorous lips and tongue, he knew what she meant.

That she needed a clean slate, or something.

She gave him back his ring—the one he’d felt so silly buying, because Clarke had never been a jewelry person and he wasn’t a down-on-one-knee type—and left it to him to break the news to their friends.

He put their house up for sale, moved into an apartment, and, after a few months, started to move on.

*

Clarke comes back to him first as a rumor: a text from Miller in the middle of a long late-summer afternoon. _Just saw Clarke and Abby downtown_. If it were anyone else bringing the news, Bellamy would ask _are you sure?_ , but Miller would take that as an insult. Of course he’s sure.

So Bellamy doesn't answer with anything at all, and he spends the rest of the day changing his mind over and over, first hoping he'll run into her himself, then hoping he won't.

She contacts him in the evening, after dark in August so it feels later than it is: 9pm but midnight black outside his window as he sits next to his bedside lamp, trying to read. Her text says: _can we talk?_ Staring at it, he starts to wonder if he's lost track of himself entirely, if hours or even days or weeks of time have fallen away under his feet. They haven't spoken at all in six months. Who starts a conversation after half a year without even so much as a _hey_ or a _how have you been?_ Has his mind swallowed up whole phone calls or long all-day texting strings? Is there a black hole in his memory reserved just for her?

Impossible, because he remembers everything. The sunlight on her face in the morning, the smell of her hair, the sound of her laugh, the feel of her skin.

He sets his phone down; he stares at the bold black letters in his book.

His phone pings again and he snatches it up, right away. His reflexes know his wants, more than his mind does.

_I know I can't ask that of you. It's not fair. But I'm saying please._

Just like Clarke, still so full of pride, to declare what she's saying instead of just saying it.

_Please_.

He plans to write back tomorrow and suggest some neutral place and time, something unobtrusive, that won't set him back at all in this life he's so painstakingly living. But instead he types out _come over_ and sets both phone and book aside.

*

Clarke has the highest caffeine tolerance of anyone Bellamy’s ever known: she drinks coffee some nights right before she goes to sleep, curled up under winter blankets with a big white mug of it, like other people drink hot chocolate or tea. He considers making some for her. But the thought so disgusts him— _doing something nice for the woman who left you, that's pathetic, why do you hate yourself so much still?_ —that he ends up shuttling her old mug across the kitchen counter top, slamming his palms against the stove when it ricochets back from the wall. Useless, useless.

He makes green tea for himself and swears he won't offer her a thing.

When she arrives, she looks smaller than he remembered: shorter, thinner, slighter. He invites her in but says as little as possible. She's the one who wanted to talk, after all. Let her talk. Let her say what she traveled all the way back home to say, let her set this conversation on its track.

"You have a nice place," she says.

"Thanks."

It's not just bitterness, or a desire to punish her, that keeps the rest of his words shoved against the back of his throat. It's the strong, magnetic pull of her. It's Clarke, love of his life, ghost of his dreams, the _one_ , standing in his kitchen staring at the linoleum floor, quiet, breathing, living, real, close enough to touch. She's stuck her hands in the pockets of her jacket—some light weight blue thing he's never seen before—and he can see that they're curled into fists. She's letting the short blunt ends of her nails bite into her own skin. If someone had told him two months ago, or three, or four, where she was, he'd have gone after her. Wouldn't have hesitated. Would have jumped in his car and crossed the country for her because missing her was easier than hating her, missing her was the easiest thing in the world to do. Missing her formed the backbone of his days and nights.

Now that she’s here, those feelings are resurfacing, battling with the bitter disdain he’s only recently allowed himself to feel.

He won't stand for her, unmoored and listless in his own tiny kitchen, so he sits down with his tea at the table and he waits for her to speak. He wonders what his gaze feels like, if she's asking herself what he's thinking, if she feels exposed and on the spot under the overhead light. He catches her glancing at her own reflection, pitched back at her from the shining black surface of the window.

"I'm sorry," she says, finally.

Those words should come as no surprise. What else could she have said? And yet—he never expected her to say it.

He inclines his head, looks down.

"Bellamy." She pulls back a chair, the scrape of it backwards louder than his name had been, and sits down with her hands on the tabletop. Her fingers are so close that he could reach out for them, if he wanted, and it would be almost no effort at all. "I... I guess I thought when I got here, I'd know what to say.”

The corner of his lips twitches up. Of course, she thought the right words would just come to her. Clarke always trusted her instincts.

"Because I always knew what to say to you. I felt like I could say anything to you."

He huffs out a hard, angry breath through his nose. That’s a lie, an obvious lie, when her old silences still haunt him. After the accident, she withdrew so completely that their last conversation, the way she stood so still on the second porch step and he just waited, knowing already what she would say, felt like a post script or an afterward, more than a final chapter or a climactic reveal. He’d _tried_ to talk to her about it. He’d given her every opportunity to let it out. She was the one who pushed the conversation off, pushed him away.

"I hated myself," she says, now, loud and defensive as she leans into the gap between them. "I hated myself so much I couldn't stand to be around anyone."

He doesn't ask _even me?_ because he knows the answer: _especially you, you who were trying so hard._

"It wasn't your fault, what happened—"

"Don't. You know it was. I don't need you to lie to me."

At least now they sound human; there's warmth, heat to their voices, passion creeping up from the embers.

"Maya's dead," she continues, softer but with that thrum of emotion still beneath. "And Raven's leg—"

"Raven is getting better, which you would know, if you'd been here. She didn't ask you to leave. Jasper didn't ask you to leave. _I_ didn't."

"Okay." She pulls back again, like the words were an assault, and Bellamy feels his own face heating up. He wants to get up, walk away, splash cold water on his skin, but he can't walk out on her. He can't walk out on this, like she did.

That's a punch too low. Even though the words were unsaid, he feels guilty for them.

She takes her hands off the table and puts them in her lap, holding them palms out first, just for a moment, her fingers curling in. Maybe a defensive gesture, maybe a surrender. "I left for me. I never tried to say otherwise." She takes another breath, in it another spasm of words unsaid, because that isn't quite true. She did say, at the time, that they'd be better off without her there. That she kept the wound from healing.

"I _know_ I left for me,” she corrects.

Bellamy lifts his mug up slowly, drinks slowly. If he stretches out this moment, maybe the right words will come. Maybe these last minutes will settle themselves in place, and it will all make sense, and he'll understand what he's been waiting half a year to understand.

Or maybe he won’t.

"Why did you come back?” he asks instead, sudden and sharp. “If you're trying to explain, you're not doing a very good job. You're not telling me anything I didn't already know."

"I know!" She spits the words out but swallows the rest down, and the expression on her face is only sadness and regret. "I know, I'm not—I’m not here to explain anything." She looks down at her hands, at her fingers twisting up around each other in her lap. For a long time, for so long he starts to wonder if this silence will ever be broken, she just breathes deep breaths and he watches her, how the air filling her lungs moves her shoulders and her chest. He listens to the slight tremor in those breaths. He wonders if she's scared. If she's holding back tears.

If she did cry, would he hold her? Would he be able to stop himself from holding her?

He's just angry enough, still, to watch her with his own impassive face, emotionless like stone as her own facade crumbles, slowly.

"I just want to come home, Bellamy," she whispers, at last. "I don't want to talk about what happened. I'm sorry that I hurt you and I want to come home."

Bellamy looks down. He moves his mug just a little so he can watch the ripples that echo out across the surface of his tea, so he can know that movement is still possible, when he himself feels so frozen. He understands now why Clarke took so long to speak. She's been broken down this last year, but she's always had her pride, held on to it in desperation even as she packed her bags and shoved them into the backseat of her car and drove away, and to let go of it now is the last and most brutal injury left to her, perhaps the most difficult challenge of all.

He has a certain amount of sympathy for that.

"Just say something, Bellamy, please. Anything."

His mind cycles quickly through impossible phrase after impossible phrase, until he settles finally on: "If you want to move back, I can't stop you." He won't look at her face as he says it, because he knows that it's cruel: to so purposefully misconstrue her, to let her think that that's all he has to say.

"You know what I mean. I want to come home to you."

She gives him only a few seconds to answer—he doesn't—then she's pulling her chair close and reaching for his hands, tilting her head to try to catch his eye. Pathetic desperation in the way she's grabbing for him. He recognizes something just as sorry and just as sad inside himself, where already there's a part of him clamoring to forgive and forget it all.

"I'm not going to sit here and waste your time and beg. I won't do it. You'll either understand why I left or you won't—" Her voice, too hard and too sharp, starts to cut at them both, and she swallows hard again and holds his hands tighter and closes her eyes. "Just—tell me to go and I will, but if you ask me to stay, I'll never leave you again. I promise. That's all I can promise, Bellamy. The future, that's it."

He misses her so brutally, he can barely breathe.

It takes him a long while, so long that Clarke has bowed her head down so that her forehead rests against their hands, and all of his own defenses have completely crumbled away, but finally he answers, “I don’t want you to leave.”

Clarke doesn’t move, but she grabs his hands tighter, so hard that it hurts and he feels her nails pricking sharp crescents in his skin. He struggles to rearrange her fingers and his fingers. It’s a relief to feel their palms pressed together at last, their fingers laced together. A relief: like the first step in coming home.

When she sits up, he can see that she’s been crying, so he wipes away her tears with his thumb. He’s almost surprised to feel that he still has such gentleness in him. And Clarke smiles, not like she’s happy, but like she’s hopeful, and wraps her arms around him, and he hugs her back and lets the barrier between them, a sediment of time and silence and regret, finally and simply wash away.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm also on [tumblr](http://kinetic-elaboration.tumblr.com/), where I talk about writing a lot and sometimes take requests.


End file.
